On 06/20/2002 10:48:27 AM "Doug Ewell" wrote:
>> it would be best for me not to post details of my research in this >> forum. Don't despair, William. Just please recognise that many of us don't have the ability to read lots of long posts. >Also, as I have tried to convey before, many of us lead relatively busy >lives and receive a lot of e-mail, and don't always have time to read >through a post of 2,000 words or more. When it gets that long, it's >better to post it on your Web site and send us an announcement. Speaking for myself, my main frustration with William's contributions has been with the length of the posts. >> My understanding was that this forum was a place to ask questions of end >> users of the Unicode system. I have done that. In this thread I have asked >> interesting scientific questions. And some of those questions have probably gone unnoticed by some or many of the members because they have been buried in lengthy messages that didn't provide enough motivating attractions for me to take the time to read them. (Note that I've read Doug's message because my experience with his contributions tells me that I can expect a good benefit : time investment ratio.) >>My understanding is that academic freedom is about >> being able to hold unpopular ideas without personal disadvantage. I don't think anyone has given you personal disadvantage because of any of your ideas. I started paying less attention to your posts because they were consistently very long and often revisited ideas that I either didn't agree with or wasn't particularly interested in. There's nothing personal in that. >> I feel >> that the fact that I am trying to use the Unicode specification as it exists >> rather than on some nudge nudge wink wink understanding of how some people >> feel that it should be interpreted is at the root of the problem. > >See, I think it's the other way around. I just reread Section 13.5 and >I don't see anything about the character-glyph model or other policies >of Unicode being suspended for the PUA... My opinion differs a bit from Doug here. I don't see any problem if you want to encode ligatures or presentation forms as PUA codepoints. I'm aware that people still need to work with software that does not provide support for the kind of processing assumed by the character-glyph model. But, I don't agree with devising some grand scheme for everyone to encode ligatures in the PUA in the same way. (I actually don't know if you proposed that since your discussions of ligatures were ones I wasn't interested in reading. I'm making assumptions based on earlier messages that I did read.) If you want to do it, fine. If I need to interchange documents with you at some point, I'll take an interest in your encoding of PUA characters. Until then, I'm not interested. Not for any personal reason. It's just that I don't have a need. >> The potentially interesting question of whether an OpenType fount may be >> programmed to produce a two colour display has not been discussed. Did you raise that question? That's something I might have noticed if it had been stated in a two-line post. But I didn't notice it, and I'm guessing it's because it was in the midst of some 500 lines. The question interests me because a while ago now I was amusing myself with the idea of being able to do this kind of thing in Graphite (another smart-font technology akin to OpenType) in order to emulate dual-coloured Ethiopic manuscripts -- specifically, I was thinking of a way to handle the paragraph marks that are done with four black dots interspersed with five red dots. Can an OpenType (or Graphite) font be programmed to do this? No. Should the technology be revised to accommodate this? There's not a clear enough case to warrent the increased complexity, I think. (But it would be possible to implement, and it's still amusing to imagine doing so.) >Such a >> discussion could have either established that it could be done, or that it >> could not be done in which case perhaps some extension to OpenType could be >> produced for the future which could have that facility. If so, how would >> that facility best be produced? That question isn't relevant until there is concensus that it *should* be produced. I don't think it should. BTW, I didn't see what reasons *you* had for wanting to control colour. If it's just to handle different colours for squares and pieces on a chess board, that doesn't belong in OpenType, even in amusing imaginings: it belongs in markup. IMO. - Peter PS: As always, the opions I express are my own and not those of the organisation for which I work. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Constable Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA Tel: +1 972 708 7485 E-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
